1. Art Appreciation What is Art History?
Gardner’s “Art Through the Ages”
Introduction

2. What we consider art: Architecture Sculpture
Pictorial Arts (painting, drawing, print making, photography)
Craft Arts (objects of utility; ex. Ceramics, jewelry, textiles)
Machine and machine produced objects belong to the history of technology

3. Historical categories historians use to arrange objects in time:
Chronology (date/how old is it?)
Provenance (place of origin/region)
Style (period or culture/”ism”
Iconography and subject matter (portrait, landscape, historical, genre, still life etc)
Attribution (who made it)
Who paid for it? (patrons)
Meaning, cause, context

4. Chronology Measuring scale of historical time
Art looks different from one period to the next.

5. Provenance Classification of place by origin
Style can have regional variations
Can allow us to see the spread of certain styles to various regions

6. Style and Stylistic Change
Time period when a work of art was made has everything to do with its style (look)
Style of a work of art is a function of its historical period

7. Iconography and Subject Matter
Iconography literally means “writing of images”
Symbols can be derived from images, and an image may have symbolic significance
What the work of art is about, the story or narrative, scene presented, person involved, environment and its details

8. Pictorial subject matter can be broadly separated into
Religious
Historical
Mythological
Genre (scenes from everyday life)
Portrait
Landscape
Still Life

9. Who made it?/Attribution
Documentary evidence: signatures, dates on work and artists own writings.

10. School: often, not always, artists are influenced by their masters, and then influence or are influenced by fellow artists working in similar styles at the same time or place (this is a chronological and stylistic classification with regards to place/origin)

11. Who paid for it?
Did someone commission the artist to create the work? (patron)

12. Architecture:
Involves both the sensibilities of a sculptor and painter and must be able to use the tools and instruments of a mathematician.

13. Categories and terms in Sculpture
Relief: figures projecting from a background from which they are a part of
High-Relief vs. Low (bas) relief
In the round

14. More on sculpture…. Subtractive: carving, reduction of original mass
Additive: built up (usually clay), make a shape, create a mold

15. Words art Historians use:
Form & Composition
Material & Technique
Line
Color
Texture
Space, Mass, Volume
Perspective & Foreshortening
Proportion & Scale
Carving & Casting
Relief Sculpture (high, low)

16. Rubens, Lion Hunt, 1617 (example of foreshortening)

17. Lorrain, Embarkation of the Queen, 1648 (example of perspective)

18. Color Chart

19. David, Michelangelo

20. Andy Warhol

21. Jackson Pollock